


Charity

by pabbeyrene



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, One Shot, Pre-Canon, Slice of Life, gratuitous headcanons, kinda fluff kinda not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:41:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29271909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pabbeyrene/pseuds/pabbeyrene
Summary: Eileen pays Djura a call.Prequel to "Childhood's End," though can be read as standalone.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Charity

**Author's Note:**

> We can have a little plotless, pointless grab-bag of random headcanons.
> 
> As a treat.

Djura had acquired another cat.

This one was even more of a raggedy charity case than usual. Matted fur, missing ear, visible ribs. The remaining ear was overlarge for its narrow head, and twitched with satisfaction as the cat watched Eileen with smug, half-lidded eyes.

 _“Really_ , Djura.”

“Really yourself,” said Djura, cheerfully. 

He was in shirtsleeves, his necktie loose, and as he spoke he mopped at his forehead with a spare rag and smeared oil across it. It was stifling hot. Djura had pushed open his window as wide as it would go, and propped open his door to create a crossbreeze, and still his room was sweltering. 

“It looks like a goblin. It’s going to suck your breath out while you sleep.”

Djura laughed. “Don’t be cruel.” He picked up a small wrench and began to unscrew something from the device he was working on. “Found him in a garbage heap out behind the Boar. You could hear him mewling from the street.”

“It’s playing you. It knows you’re a sop. It’s playing a confidence game.”

The flimflamming goblin yawned, exposing a rather horrible-looking mottled tongue. A dish by its feet held the last remnants of a meat pasty, torn into small pieces for easier feline consumption. 

“You just don’t like him because you’re an overgrown crow and cats are your natural enemy. Don’t mind her,” Djura added to the cat, which began licking its paw. 

“Mm.” Eileen pulled out her own handkerchief and dabbed at her upper lip. She wore her lighter summer coat and trousers, made of cotton instead of wool, but even so it was days like today that made her look longingly at the ladies’ summer dresses and shady bonnets. She wasn’t a novice any longer, well past the days when she was obliged to wear her uniform at all times. But she had found increasingly, for some reason she couldn’t name, that she preferred her trousers to skirts, and was glad to have an excuse to wear them. 

Still, on days like today, trousers clung to the legs in a way petticoats didn’t. 

She went to the window and pushed it, fruitlessly, to try to gain another inch of breeze. A soupy, disgruntled clamor wafted up from below, the beleaguered noise of crowds drawn to the streets to escape overheated apartments. Heat-slurred conversation, cart-wheel rumble, fussy wails from sticky babies pressed to sticky breasts. Even three stories up, the ripe scent of sweaty bodies and fermenting garbage tinged the thick air. 

“How can you stand it?” 

Djura shrugged, intent on his tinkering. “It’s worse at the workshop. At least here it’s not crowded.”

Or it hadn’t been, before Eileen entered. Djura’s room was cramped, bed and washbasin squeezed tight against one wall. No space for a chest of drawers, even, only a trunk under the bed. Or perhaps that workbench where Djura was fiddling, crammed against the opposite wall, had once _been_ the chest of drawers. It did have rather an improvised look about it.

“And I can look after your little goblin,” Djura added. “He’s got a cut that needs healing.”

“No goblin of mine,” Eileen protested. The cat was seated on a table near the sill, and it flicked its tail in amusement. 

Djura’s lockbox was beneath it, on the shelf under the washbasin. Just sitting out for all the world to see. The lock was broken; Djura, despite having tools always in hand, felt no urgency about fixing it. For once, Eileen felt relieved instead of annoyed. It had been some time since she last paid a call. It wasn’t as though she visited often at the best of times, and since their conversation at the end of the last hunt—where, in a fit of fatigue, she had revealed something she really shouldn’t have—she had to admit she had avoided him somewhat.

Eileen slipped her hand into her coat pocket.

“What about the rest of your pack?” she asked as she reached downwards.

“Out causing trouble somewhere. As long as the window’s open they’ll stop by for a bite and a pet. Malka had her babies and brought them by to meet me. They’ve got the funniest little stripes.” As he pattered on, he held up some cog or screw to the light, and Eileen jerked her hand away from the box. Djura didn’t notice. He squinted at the piece with his one good eye and made a little huff of frustration, then picked up the rag again and, angling away from Eileen, dabbed delicately at the skin beneath his eyepatch.

It didn’t seem quite sanitary, but the skin was healed and Eileen held her tongue. 

“What about the big ugly one?” she said instead. “The gray one with the crooked jaw?”

Djura’s shoulders hunched. “Dead.” He went back to his bits and bobs, his motions mechanical now, self-conscious. “Some beast got her on the last hunt.” 

“Oh.” Eileen tugged at the front of her coat, unpeeling her shirt from her sticky skin. “I’m sorry.”

Djura turned a screw with more violence than usual. “I think I got it,” he said. “I found one nearby, still bloody. It won’t get anything else.”

Djura really _felt_ things like this. The cat had been a hideous half-feral creature, with bulbous eyes and misaligned teeth, that hissed and spat at anything that came near. And Djura had fed it and named it, and now even thinking of its demise made him bury himself in his work, refusing to look at her, his very reluctance to reveal his distress giving him away.

In moments like these, he always took on the look of something chronically underfed. Small and stooped and nervous.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your company today?” he asked.

Eileen was happy enough to change the subject, though the news would hardly improve his mood. “There was a council in the Ward last night. Called rather suddenly. Some couldn’t make it, but …” She watched his mouth tighten before finishing her sentence. “I take it the Kegs weren’t invited.”

“Evidently not.” He dragged his arm across his brow, rested his hands on the table. “Damn.”

“I’m sorry.” She was.

“Not your fault.” He was holding himself uncharacteristically still, the way he only did when he was truly upset. “What do we need to know?”

“Beasts in Central Yharnam in the last hunt. A bishop’s niece has gone missing,” she said, with pointed delicacy, “and her husband’s corpse found in their bedroom. If any of the neighbors noticed that the beast that killed him was still wearing scraps of lace, well …”

“Well,” Djura agreed, with some measure of viciousness in his tone. “Wouldn’t that just be—compromising.”

“Mm.” Eileen looked for somewhere else to rest her gaze, to give him a measure of privacy. She reached tentatively towards the cat, which had stretched itself out in the sunlight. At her approach it raised its head, gave something between a sneeze and an offended snort, and leapt to its feet and away. Eileen snatched her hand back and grasped at the bedpost instead, which was of course what she’d been reaching for all along.

Wretched little creature.

“Do you think—” she began, only to watch with great irritation as the cat leapt to Djura’s workbench, picked its way around the bits and bobs, and happily accepted his absentminded scratches.

“Do you suppose that all the beasts are—that way? Has it been that way all along?”

Djura gave a sad half-shrug, looking down at the cat. “Probably,” he said. “I don’t suppose they pop out of nowhere, do they?” He smoothed his hand down the cat’s spine; it flicked its tail. “You know, before the microscope, people used to think that things could spontaneously generate—that maggots in meat were just born out of it, from nothing to something.” 

“Did they?” Eileen never ceased to be baffled by the array of historical trivia that Djura, with his half-complete charity-school education, could apparently command.

“The Church would’ve liked it if we’d all bought back into that, wouldn’t they?” he mused. “All those beasts just born out of the Yharnam fogs; something in the atmosphere.”

“You don’t suppose that they—that most of them—were animals, to start?”

He shook his head. “There’s no unusual shortage of strays these days. No pets gone missing, no stables empty. Plenty of people, though.”

Plenty of people. Mostly poor, some foreign, residents of tenements and disreputable boarding-houses down in the slums at the base of Yharnam. Many had none who would miss them; even if they did, life was difficult and desperate in quarters of the city still gripped by vestiges of the ashen blood. There were many reasons someone could disappear.

And if they had families, roommates, anyone with whom they shared a roof, those people tended to be discovered with their throats torn out, and if the one of the children was missing, who would notice amongst the carnage? If father or mother wasn’t present in the gruesome tableau, who wouldn’t assume that they had been carried off by the same thing that killed the others? Who would imagine that they themselves might be the source of those enormous bites and wicked claw-marks?

Unless, of course, some of the missing were no longer poor, no longer anonymous, no longer one of a crowd of faces crammed into a single stinking room. If that were the case, people might indeed begin to wonder.

The Church had tried to hide it even from the hunters, at first. A sure sign that all the power and money in the world couldn’t keep you from becoming an utter fool. They’d actually imagined that hunters might dedicate their lives to chasing these beasts, might pursue them through streets and shops, into offices and drawing-rooms, and not notice the incontrovertible evidence, never catch one in the moment of transformation. Even so, she felt that they all had hoped—as she herself must admit she had hoped—that perhaps these were exceptions, or evolutions. That it hadn’t always been this way. That not every beast they killed had once been human.

Fools at the top and fools at the bottom and fools everywhere in between, it seemed.

“You can sit down, you know.”

Djura was looking at her now, smiling wryly; she realized she was hovering rather awkwardly, one hand still on the bedpost. It would have felt more natural to sit, but the trouble was that the only available place in this narrow rented room was the bed. And that, despite everything—despite the trousers, despite the blade and the cloak, despite her own awareness of the utter impossibility of any such thing, despite the fact that she herself had waltzed unaccompanied into the private rooms of an unmarried man—somehow, despite everything, that felt like a breath too far. She could almost hear, faintly, some maternal figure hissing in displeasure.

“You know I’m not going to take it as an invitation,” Djura added, smiling impishly and raising his eyebrows, with the attitude of someone enjoying a private joke with a friend; and gods help her, if he were going to treat— _that_ —as a private joke, she—well, she didn’t know what she would do, but she would really rather he didn’t.

She sat down, to oblige him and avoid betraying her discomfort. But she cast her mind around for some way of turning the conversation away from that _other_ conversation a few weeks ago.

“Is this your new project?” she said, nodding at the pieces and parts on the table. “The one with the—?” She made a vague mechanical gesture; Djura had tried to explain his latest experiment to her, but she had no head for engineering and tended to _mm_ and _mmhm_ her way through these dissertations.

“Yes, it’s—stop that.” Djura batted at the cat’s tail. The little beast was picking its way around the parts on the table, sniffing with delicate interest; as it did so, it was swatting its tail against Djura’s face. He went on, “It’s really much more refined than the last one. I think even you’d approve.”

“Refined is a relative term,” Eileen said. “Do try to keep most of your limbs intact.” She nearly said something about preserving at least one of his eyes, but bit her tongue at the last moment; that wound was, perhaps, still a bit too fresh.

“Intact limbs are a sign of weakness.”

She laughed. “Among your people, perhaps.”

“You obey your strange customs and I’ll obey mine. Stop that!” He swatted the tail away again, laughing himself, and for a moment it seemed all danger was averted.

Then he said, “Speaking of strange customs. If you’re going to act like a brooding hen, shall I start needling you about whether you’ve found a nice girl to settle down with?”

Eileen half-leapt to her feet, face flushing more miserably hot than it had been even a moment ago. “I—you—that was shared with you in _confidence_ ,” she hissed, as she forced herself to sit back down. She had gripped the bedpost again and she pried her fingers off it now.

Djura just laughed, damn him. “We’re _in_ confidence,” he said, gesturing to the empty room.

She knew she shouldn’t have told him about her—peculiarity. Should have known he wouldn’t take it seriously. Not that he would ever tell anyone else; she would never, in a million years, under the direst torture, have told him if she thought there was any danger of that. But he seemed to be under the impression that just because he was— _peculiar_ —in a similar fashion, he now had license to joke and jibe about it, as if it were some sort of private game and not one of her most closely-guarded secrets.

“Honestly, Eileen, the barmaid at the Boar fancies you. She thinks you’re handsome in your trousers.”

“She does nothing of the kind,” Eileen seethed. “Stop that.”

He smiled at her fondly, raised his eyebrows, and went back to his tinkering. An adult deciding to wait another day to explain some fact of life that a child was stubbornly resisting. She could have killed him.

Perhaps she would have, if at that very moment the bells of St. Anna’s hadn’t begun to chime. They were always first. Then came the Grand Cathedral, too slow and lumbering to beat the smaller church, but more than able to overpower it; its bells’ thudding reverberation trembled up through the floors and shook the walls, even here. Its primacy lasted only a breath, for then came crashing in another church, and another; tremendous sky-straining basilicas and half-forgotten stone chapels, and the humble parish church in the square only blocks away, all clamoring and clattering that it was time for evening mass.

Djura put down his tools and went to the window.

He leaned outwards, head tilted, and though his face was turned away Eileen knew that he wore that dreamy half-smile; he always did at this time of day. For a man who hated Yharnam’s Church he loved the sound of Yharnam’s bells. The conversation had ceased below, and through the window came the slightest whisper of an evening breeze.

Eileen reached into her pocket, leaned forward, lifted the lid of Djura’s lockbox, and slipped several coins inside it.

He didn’t notice. The bells began to fade; the cacophony dwindled to a chorus and then to a few single, straggling chimes. Conversation and cart-wheels struck up on the street again. Today was not a worship-day and the mass was not obligatory. 

Djura pushed off from the window and went back to his tools. Eileen stood.

“I need to be on my way. Enjoy your goblin.”

“Ah, Eileen,” he said, “I’ve really offended you. I’m sorry—”

“You haven’t offended me in the slightest. I may have work tonight, that’s all.” She nodded to him briefly and left, before he could say any other ridiculous things.

Walking back out into the street introduced a slight current of air, and the smell of sweat-drenched bodies with it. Eileen walked briskly; she’d accomplished her purpose here. Djura would never notice the extra coin. He had no head for money, any more than he had a head for keeping it safe. Whenever Eileen chided him for the state of his lockbox he would just laugh and say, _If anyone’s desperate enough to steal from_ me _, they need it more than I do._ He never kept a tally of his funds; he just reached into his box and hoped for the best. And usually, miraculously, something came. Eileen knew she wasn’t the only one of Djura’s companions who occasionally slipped something in when his back was turned; and there were tailors and smiths and tavern-keepers all through the city whose prices mysteriously dropped when Djura walked into their establishment.

Something brushed against Eileen’s ankle. She seized her pistol’s hilt, and it was only the press of people that prevented her from instinctively striking out at the thing with her foot. A good thing, too: it proved to be none other than Djura’s goblin, apparently bored of its sickroom and ready to adventure outwards. It looked up at her insolently.

“Shoo,” Eileen said.

Its single ear flicked in disdain and it darted off between the crowd’s legs. Eileen shook her head and walked onwards.

She would never understand why Djura found so much satisfaction in caring for some raggedy stray.


End file.
